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Friday, Jun. 28, 2002 - 11:43 p.m. - Finally Pictures of the (almost completed) Nursery
Warning: This entry is very photo intensive, sorry for the long download time! Yes, that’s right! Finally the nursery is pretty much completed! Only final finishing touches remain -- decorating the shelves, digging out my picture books, little knickknacks here and there, etc.
Yesterday at about 9:00 am the carpet layers showed up and within no time the new carpet was laid! It looked so nice with the new carpet in there. So, of course, we had to take a few pictures, here’s one to give you an idea of what it looks like with no furniture. In the picture it looks kind of grayish, but really it’s a nice soft cream color. Not too different from the cream colored wainscoting we put in. Doesn’t it all look so nice and finished now?! Then we moved the crib in and made that up and brought the rocking chair in. With those two pieces of furniture in the room, Michael and I looked at each other and it really hit us that we are going to have a baby (if all continues to go well) in just a little over 2 months! Wow, it just really sunk in when we set the crib up. I must say it felt strange that we would be parents and that we would even have a nursery in our house. It felt good, mind you, but suddenly very real and very strange! This is what you see when you walk in the door to the nursery. The combo unit against the left wall and the bed against the back wall.
We didn’t get the dresser/changing table combo unit until today and Michael was still doing some finishing touches on what was once the closet (I’ll explain when I show the pictures), so we didn’t get anymore done on the room yesterday. It was killing me because I wanted to get it done, but everything takes time. Instead I washed and ironed the new bedding for the double bed that will be in that room for a while, both so that it can still be used as a guest room (or so that Michael and I can sleep there with the Peep while guests can use our room) and also so that I can sleep in there with the baby if need be when she is sick or something. So today we got the dresser and set up the bed and pretty much finished the room. There are still no books on the shelves and Michael is still working on one little project on the “closet” but for the most part it is done. So here are the pictures.
To the right of the bed is the window and the rocking chair. We want to put a small table or nightstand here next to the chair so that when I’m rocking the baby I can have the phone and other things handy, not to mention we want to put the lamp on the table by the chair too for bedtime story reading.
This is where the former closet used to be for the room. While we were planning out the room and deciding where to place furniture when we first started planning for our Peep, Michael wanted to keep the bed in the room and I didn’t want to use up all the space for a big bed. We started thinking about things and talked about how there was all this dead space in the middle of the room, due to the closet. You couldn’t place anything there because it would be in the way of the closet. Then we started thinking about the fact that babies really don’t need a closet much since most of their things are folded and in drawers. So we started to think about what we could do if we took out the closet doors and built the closet out as a nook for the double bed for now, and then later it could be modified into a reading nook with a big bench seat that could serve as a toy box or a nook for a computer desk later or all kinds of different things. We figured we could always get a clothing armoire if we wanted to have someplace to hang things at a later date. So we decided to try something different and pulled everything out of the closet and this is what we came up with. We are quite pleased with it and it really adds character to an otherwise square room. What do you think? Michael also put in electrical outlets so that we can put a clock radio on one of the shelves and a small lamp or swing arm lamp up too.
Here is a shot of the “bed nook” straight on. The long embroidered, framed “picture” is something my grandmother made for me. My mom had it framed and now the Peep will have something from her great-grandmother hanging in her room. It’s very special to me and I hope she values it too some day. Beneath it and to the left is a cross-stitch piece that a dear friend in Denmark (Hi Maria) made and sent to me after my failed IVF to remind me to keep my hopes up and that perhaps one day it would hang in my nursery. Shortly after receiving her sweet gift we got the good news about my pregnancy. Maria, as you can see, your piece holds a place of honor in the nursery and I will think of you each time I look at it! Oh and the stork (the stuffed animal with the long red legs) was a gift my mom brought back from Germany for me too after our failed IVF in hopes that it would bring us luck, so of course, it has to go into the room too!
This is another shot of the bed nook and unfortunately I didn’t close the bedroom door before I took the picture because we have a cute white mirror and two hooks on the back of it which look really cute. Midnight managed to get in the picture though. She wants to check everything out in the room and we are letting her do so to a degree, but she gets reprimanded any time she looks like she is going to try and jump into the baby bed. We don’t want to start something with her in that way, besides, we don’t need black kitty hair all over everything in there.
One final shot of the dressing table and bed and mural. We think the room is beautiful and even more than we ever expected to have. It was a lot of work, but it was definitely worth it, just like this little Peep! Shortly after we finished the room, I had a wonderful visit with a fellow journaler who had come down to Seattle from Vancouver to drive some friends to the airport. She wrote me and asked if she could come by and bring me a little gift!! Do I have the sweetest readers or what?? I said that she was welcome to come by and I’m so pleased she did. She was the first non-family member to see the completed room! That sweet girl brought me all kinds of unbelievably beautiful scrapbooking items for use in my Peeps album! Her generosity and thoughtfulness was overwhelming! The items she brought me were simply exquisite and certainly something that I wouldn’t be allowing myself to purchase any time soon with our unemployed status. I just couldn’t thank her enough. She brought me pretty papers, stickers, a beautiful poem (that made me cry), and these hand made 3-d “stickers” that would simply take your breath away. I’ll need to take a picture of them so that you can see what I mean. I’ve never seen anything like it. I will definitely have to see if I can make a trip to the scrapbooking store she works at the next time I’m in Vancouver! Thank you again Ophelia!!! Besides that we had a good time chatting for about an hour and a half!!! Time just flew by! Everything else is going well with me. Despite having to take my blood sugars 5 times a day, I’ve only had one high reading and that was a fasting one. Fortunately since then my levels have come down considerably by my eating an evening snack. I’m really not having too hard a time with the diet (except for the missing juice and Slurpees), so things are going well. And tomorrow is shower day. Can I just say that I still can’t believe that I am having a baby shower! That after all these years of dreaming, wishing and hoping it is really MY turn. I have to say that even my bridal shower wasn’t as exciting or thrilling to me as this one is. I still think someone needs to pinch me, but then I don’t really want to wake up from this dream! Me, Heidi, having a baby shower thrown for her! Life is full of little miracles! I wish all of you out there who are trying so desperately to conceive get to experience this joy yourselves one day soon! As thrilled as I am for myself, I can’t help but think often of those I “left behind” that are still trying to conceive. I wish this for you as I once wished it for myself! Don’t ever give up and keep dreaming and hoping.
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